“I asked Mr. Harkness where he and Miss Harkness and Mr. Sydney Jones were situated and how employed subsequent to the departure of the riding party. Mr. Harkness replied that he instructed Jones to drive into Montjoy and collect horse fodder, which he later did. At this point Mr. Harkness broke down and spoke very confusedly about Mr. Jones — something about him not having got the mare reshod as ordered. He shed tears considerably. Mr. Jones, on being interviewed, testified that Mr. Harkness had words with the deceased who was in her room but who looked out of her window and spoke to him, he being at that time in the stable yard. I asked Mr. Harkness ‘Was she locked in her room?’ He said she had carried on to that extent that he went quietly upstairs and turned the key in her door, which at this point was in the outside lock. When I examined the door, the key was in the inside lock and was in the unlocked position. I noted a gap of three-quarters of an inch between door and floor. I noted a thin rug laying in the gap. I pointed this out to Mr. Harkness who told me that he had left the key in the outside lock. I examined the rug and the area where it lay and formed the opinion it had been dragged into the room. The displacement of dust on the floor caused me to form this opinion, which was supported by Mr. Harkness to the extent that the deceased had effected an escape in this manner when a schoolgirl.”
Plank looked up. “I have the key, sir,” he said.
“Right. So your reading is that she waited until her uncle was gone and then poked the key onto the mat. With what?”
“She carried one of those old-time pocket knives with a spike for getting stones out of hooves. It was in her breeches pocket.”
“ ‘First Steps in Easy Detection,’ ” Alleyn murmured.
“Sir?”
“Yes, all right. Could be. So you read it that at some stage after this performance she let herself out, went downstairs, cut away the wire and dumped it we don’t know where. But replaced the cutters—”
Fox said: “Ah. Yes. There’s that.”
“—and then saddled up the mare and rode to her death. I can’t,” said Alleyn, rubbing his nose, “get it to run smoothly. It’s got a spurious feel about it. But then, of course, one hasn’t known that poor creature. What was she like, Plank?”
After a considerable pause Plank said: “Big.”
“One could see that. As a character? Come on, Plank.”
“Well,” said Plank, a countryman, “if she’d been a mare you’d of said she was always in season.”
“That’s a peculiar way of expressing yourself, Sergeant Plank,” Fox observed austerely.
“My son said something to much the same effect,” said Alleyn.
They returned to the yard. When they were halfway up the horse paddock Alleyn stooped and poked at the ground. He came up with a small and muddy object in the palm of his hand.
“Somebody’s lost a button,” he said. “Rather a nice one. Off a sleeve, I should think.”
“I never noticed it,” said Plank.
“It’d been trodden by a horse into the mud.”
He put it in his pocket.
“What’s the vet called, Plank?” he asked.
“Blacker, sir, Bob.”
“Did you see the cut on the mare’s leg?”
“No, sir. He’d bandaged her up when I looked at her.”
“Like it or lump it, he’ll have to take it off. Ring him up, Plank.”
When Mr. Blacker arrived he seemed to be, if anything, rather stimulated to find police on the spot. He didn’t even attempt to hide his curiosity and darted avid little glances from one to the other.
“Something funny in the wind, is there?” he said, “or what?”
Alleyn asked if he could see the injury to the mare’s leg. Blacker demurred, but more as a matter of form, Alleyn thought, than with any real concern. He went to the mare’s loose-box and was received with that air of complete acceptance and noninterest that animals seem to reserve for veterinary surgeons.
“How’s the girl, then?” asked Mr. Blacker.
She was wearing a halter. He moved her about the loose-box and then walked her around the yard and back.
“Nothing much the matter there, is there?” Plank ventured.
The mare stretched out her neck toward Alleyn and quivered her nostrils at him.
“Like to take hold of her?” the vet asked.
Alleyn did. She butted him uncomfortably, drooled slightly, and paid no attention to the removal of the bandage.
“There we are,” said Mr. Blacker. “Coming along nicely.”
Hair was growing in where it had been shaved off around the cut, which ran horizontally across the front of the foreleg about three inches above the hoof. It had healed, as Mr. Blacker said, good and pretty and they’d have to get those two stitches out, wouldn’t they? This was effected with a certain display of agitation on the part of the patient.
Alleyn said: “What caused it?”
“Bit of a puzzle, really. There were scratches from the blackthorn, which you’ll have seen was knocked about, and bruises and one or two superficial grazes, but she came down in soft ground. I couldn’t find anything to account for this cut. It went deep, you know. Almost to the bone. There wasn’t anything of the sort in the hedge but, my God, you’d have said it was wire.”
“Would you indeed?” Alleyn put his hand in his pocket and produced the few inches of wire he had cut from the coil in the coach house. He held it alongside the scar.
“Would that fit?” he asked.
“By God,” said Mr. Blacker, “it certainly would.”
Alleyn said, “I’m very much obliged to you, Blacker.”
“Glad to be of any help. Er — yes — er,” said Mr. Blacker, “I suppose, er, I mean, er—”
“You’re wondering why we’re here? On departmental police business, but your Super finding himself out of action suggested we might take a look at the scene of the accident.”
They were in the stable yard. The Leathers string of horses had moved to the brow of the hill. “Which,” Alleyn asked, “is Mungo, the wall-eyed bay?”
“That thing!” said Blacker. “We put it down a week ago. Cuth always meant to, you know, it was a wrong ’un. He’d taken a scunner on it after it kicked him. Way he talked about it, you’d have thought it was possessed of a devil. It was a real villain, I must say. Dulce fancied it, though. Thought she’d make a show jumper of it. Fantastic! Well, I’ll be on my way. Morning to you.”
When he had gone Alleyn said: “Shall we take a look at the barn? If open.”
It was a stone building standing some way beyond the stables and seemed to bear witness to the vanished farmstead, said by Plank to have predated Leathers. There were signs of a thatched roof having been replaced by galvanized iron. They found a key above the door, which carried the legend “Welcome to all” in amateurish capitals.
“That lets us in,” said Fox, drily.
The interior was well lit from uncurtained windows. There was no ceiling to hide the iron roof and birds could be heard scruffling about outside. The hall wore that air of inert expectancy characteristic of places of assembly caught, as it were, by surprise. A group of about a hundred seats, benches of various kinds, and a harmonium faced a platform approached by steps, on which stood a table, a large chair, and six smaller ones. The table carried a book prop and an iron object that appeared to symbolize fire, flanked by a cross and a sword.
“That’ll be Chris Beale, the smith’s, work,” said Plank, spotting it. “He’s one of them.”
The platform, set off by curtains, was backed by a whitewashed wall with a central door. This was unlocked and opened into a room fitted with a gas boiler, a sink, and cupboards with crockery. “ ‘Ladies a basket’ we must remember,” Alleyn muttered and returned to the platform. Above the door and occupying half of the width of the wall hung an enormous placard, scarlet and lettered in white. “THE WAGES OF SIN,” it alarmingly proclaimed, “ARE DEATH.”